


A Tragedy By Any Other Name

by onnenlintu



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: I basically only wrote this because the mental image of Emil as Hamlet was too good not to share, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 21:25:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16145843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onnenlintu/pseuds/onnenlintu
Summary: When Tuuri drags the whole crew into an under-resourced theatre production, Onni's just glad her vision includes him staying backstage. Cracky modern AU oneshot.





	A Tragedy By Any Other Name

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Но всё же драма остаётся драмой](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18329717) by [ji_tera](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ji_tera/pseuds/ji_tera)



_“Oh, help him, you sweet heavens.”_ Lalli’s third attempt to act out the line he’d memorised was no less monotonal than the first two times.  
  
“Please, Lalli, can’t you at least try?” Tuuri looked ready to tear her hair out. “Come on, give it a bit of feeling.”  
  
“I am giving it _a bit_ of feeling.” Lalli picked up another slice of his oven pizza.  
  
“Can you give it a bit _more_ , maybe?”  
  
_“Oh… help him, you… sweet heavens.”_ Attempt number four succeeded only in sounding incredibly sarcastic. Tuuri put her face in her hands and wailed. Onni felt like perhaps she could have predicted this outcome, but declined to say anything. He could only be grateful that the costume hadn’t fit him, a mere accident of physicality sparing him Lalli’s unfortunate fate here. Having to perform any kind of play, much less in English, was about the most nightmarish thing he could imagine.  
  
Of course, it had been good when Tuuri had started studying so nearby. The fact there were a few foreigners at this backwoods community college was enough to stop her getting too obsessed with leaving for now, and she was still able to come over every weekend for their usual family get-together of putting three frozen pizzas in the oven and sharing precisely two hours of conversation. That is, until she’d been handed the responsibility of directing this performance with her classmates. Onni had come back one day from raiding the freezer in the garage, pile of pizzas in hand, and found her holding Lalli in place while she circled him to inspect the costume she’d pulled over his head.  
  
“Couldn’t you find anyone else to do this?” Lalli had been standing still while it happened and complying when Tuuri moved him around, but had clearly not been enthusiastic about it.  
  
“Well, the thing is, we don’t actually have the budget for any more costumes, and this dress was made for someone a bit skinnier than anyone else I know, so…” Tuuri kind of waved her hand as if expecting it to finish her point for her.  
  
“I think Ophelia is a girl’s name.”  
  
“Technically, dressing a boy up to play Shakespearean women is how it was traditionally done, so I guess we’ll claim it’s… historical, or something.”

“Uh, okay.” Lalli’s cargo pants were still protruding from the bottom of the frilly mess he had been forced into. It seemed almost too apt a visual metaphor for his apathy about the situation.  
  
“Thanks _so_ much, Lalli! And you’re so good at memorising things, I’m sure we can make this work…”  
  
Onni definitely felt bad watching him be dragged into this, but well, Lalli did seem so genuinely unfussed about what clothes he was put in that it was probably easier on him than most. The intense awkwardness Onni would have felt mis-pronouncing lines didn’t quite seem to get at Lalli the same way either, so it was probably okay to let this happen. He could only hope that nobody else would drop out and leave Tuuri short of an actor again.  
  
Tuuri was giving up on teaching Lalli to insert emotion into his lines. “Well, at least you do remember them! That’s something! Maybe it’ll improve in the dress rehearsal.”  
  
Onni just kept shoveling pizza into his mouth, pleased that another week had gone by without him needing to be involved in this. Tuuri picked up his plate for him. Oh no, she was doing his washing up. That meant she had a favour to ask.  
  
“So, Onni, you’re pretty good at woodworking.”  
  
Onni hung back against the wall of the kitchen, nervously eyeing how meticulous Tuuri was being in cleaning his stovetop. “Yes.”  
  
“How would you feel about perhaps helping out with some set design? It’s just, the guy we have doing it is great, he’s always really helpful! He’s only one person though, and he can be a bit uh… clumsy, and disorganised, sometimes, and having a second person on hand would be really, _really_ -”  
  
“How many times a week?” Onni couldn’t describe his relief at this being something that didn’t actually involve getting on the stage.  
  
“Three! Oh, you’re the best, thanks so much! I’ll make sure there’s enough space for you to park when you bring your tools.”  
  
Onni sighed. He guessed he would be bringing those, then. Hopefully this “clumsy, disorganised” guy wasn’t going to bankrupt him by breaking them all.  
  
********  
  
“First thing’s first - I am so, so sorry we had to call you in, I should have been able to handle it all myself, it’s just...” It turned out that this guy was not only clumsy and disorganised, but also Icelandic, and hadn’t yet learned a word of Finnish. Onni had never previously appreciated how limited his power-tools-related vocabulary was in English, but that was far from the biggest problem here. “Um, let me just give you a bit of a - an appraisal of the situation here. So we have like, some pallets and a bunch of paint that peels right away and some mostly-bent nails?”  
  
“Right.” Onni could at least appreciate this guy’s honesty. Reynir, that was the name.  
  
“And I feel like the actors… probably need all the support they can get, so we’ve got our work cut out here when it comes to creating the atmosphere.” Reynir twisted the end of his long braid in his fingers. “In the best way, honestly! I just think, ah, maybe the ghost isn’t meant to sound that sarcastic all the time - at least he’s actually Danish? - and they might have _slightly_ misjudged who they let play Hamlet.”  
  
“Misjudged?” Onni wasn’t really sure how one judged these things in the first place.  
  
“Well, when Tuuri was casting it, she said she thought it was pretty much impossible to pick someone too dramatic, but - ”  
  
Their conversation was interrupted when a young man, crowned with both a mop of silky golden hair and a heavily bedazzled plastic tiara, ran into the prop-building area brandishing a glue gun. “Reynir! Have you seen the diamante packs? I ran out as I was sticking more on the back.” Taking the tiara off his head, he demonstrated where the gap was with an air of desperate urgency. “Look! There’s nowhere near enough!”  
  
Reynir laughed awkwardly. “Ah, ha, speak of the devil! Onni, have you met Emil yet? Here’s our um, Swedish, Danish prince.”  
  
Emil was in the middle of shaking Onni’s hand in greeting when the glue gun started to emit smoke, seemingly without any provocation at all. Onni felt like he was starting to get the picture here.  
  
*****  
  
Onni had never realised quite how long these things took to prepare for. At first he’d thought he would have to work practically round the clock to hack together the long list of props in time, but it turned out they’d had over a month still scheduled in to make sure everyone had their lines and cues down. The main downside of all this time was that even now, a week in, there remained several weeks’ worth of hearing Emil beg to extend the death scene just a little bit. Apparently he didn’t feel he could do justice to the drama of it with the script as-is. This was their first rehearsal with a proper stage, and the negotiations were going on somewhere in the seating area, loudly enough for Onni to still hear them backstage. Poking his head around the curtain that hid backstage from the audience, Onni watched in total resignation.  
  
“Just two extra times. Just little screams.” Emil was begging Tuuri, sparkly tiara pressed to his chest to illustrate the sincerity of his pathos.  
  
“I said no! Sigrun dies in the same scene as you, and we have to let Claudius’s death have some of the drama as well!”  
  
“There can always be _twice_ the drama - ”  
  
“The audience needs good pacing. This is meant to be a _serious tragedy_ , Emil, so the screaming and bedazzling have _got_ to go.” Tuuri was not budging.  
  
“It’s already a serious tragedy! Have you _seen_ the quality of the foundation they’re making us wear?”  
  
Retreating back behind the curtain, Onni turned back to Reynir and spoke in a low voice. “I feel sometimes like we’re the only sane people working on this.”  
  
“Good to know you still feel sane.” Reynir was detangling a mess of cords, the first they’d seen of what would be the lighting. Tuuri hadn’t been wrong about him being clumsy, but Onni couldn’t deny he worked hard. With a little organisation inflicted on him, his helpfulness almost made this enjoyable.  
  
“I don’t think it will last.” Embracing just a shade of the drama himself with another hearty sigh, Onni knelt beside Reynir and helped him finish detangling the cords. Apparently the two of them would be on lighting and sound as well once the actual performances started, so he might as well start to work out how these things functioned. Onni winced as he heard Sigrun’s voice enter the argument too, starting to ask why they couldn’t “update” the play so that her character had killed someone with a sword instead of “wimpy” poison. He was glad he wasn’t the one who had to explain for the fourteenth time why they were sticking to the script.  
  
Reynir had to pass on the routine today, the one they’d come up with of going for coffee together after they were done with props. “Definitely next time though, yeah?” His smile and touch on Onni’s shoulder as they parted were the closest thing to something pleasant about this whole experience. Taking him up on the offer of hanging out properly was something that should probably happen sometime. Onni was perhaps a little disappointed in the fact he knew on some level that would always be an “eventually” priority.  
  
As he was leaving, Onni discovered Lalli stowing away his costume and offered to drive him home. It was the least he could do for someone who was being forced into constant proximity to that dramatic Swedish boy and all the rest of them. Tuuri seemed totally resigned to his antics, and when Onni had asked why he hadn’t been put on props instead if he absolutely couldn’t be trusted not to wildly over-act, the haunted look on Tuuri’s face had stopped Onni questioning it much more deeply. Apparently nobody had known quite how flammable it was possible for backstage to be, until the last time they’d tried that tactic.  
  
Most of the car journey went by in absolute silence, Lalli gazing silently into the roadside forest and occasionally reacting near-imperceptibly when Radio Rock threw up something good. As they reached the turnoff leading to Lalli’s flat, Onni spoke up. “It sucks for you that you have to spend so much time dealing with the Hamlet boy. I hope it’s not too bad, he really is... a bit much.”  
  
“Mm. He’s a good kisser though, so I forgive him.” Lalli didn’t even turn his head to say it.  
  
“Um! I. I um, I didn’t realise there was a scene in the play where you had to do that.” Onni had been so sure that when you kissed someone on stage, you didn’t have to _actually_ kiss them, and that by now he’d seen multiple iterations of all the scenes in this play. He might actually have to try to talk to Tuuri about having roped Lalli into this role.  
  
“Oh, there isn’t.” Once again, Lalli spoke as if he was remarking on the weather.  
  
Onni was still blinking in shock when Lalli got out of the car, threw a “thanks” back over his shoulder and started to fish his keys from his pocket for the building’s door. He supposed now he was meant to just drive off and think about that as little as Lalli seemed to be doing. Maybe Reynir would have a companion in stress-madness next time they met.  
  
*******  
  
“Oh, I hope that stuff we had to hammer together at the last minute is going to hold.” Reynir seemed to be losing his marbles a bit as everything reached the point where it was meant to come together, and Onni was entirely on the same page. Having made it to opening night at all was an achievement, and a full three-quarters of the dress rehearsals had gone without anything being set on fire at all. Onni was not one for hoping much, but there was a real likelihood that the worst thing that was going to happen tonight would be Lalli droning through a heavily Finnified, monotonal version of _“O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!”_ , and weeks of practise had proven they could all deal with that. Onni entered the sound booth with minimal panic, all things considered.  
  
Reynir was already in there, triple-checking that he knew where everything was for the cues on his list. “Okay, so you’re sure Tuuri’s friend is okay with handing out stuff for the costume changes?”  
  
“As sure as anyone is about anything around here.”  
  
“Well, I guess the audience is arriving, so there’s nothing more we can do now.” Reynir moved over a little and let Onni take his place beside him. As usual, he was about the sanest voice present in this whole fiasco. There was indeed nothing the two of them could do but watch this happen.  
  
The opening scene went off without a hitch. It probably helped that some of Tuuri’s more sensible friends had been roped into every role featured in it. Scene 2, featuring King Claudius winking knowingly at the audience from the very first time she mentioned her “dear brother”, was where it started to feel rather less in line with the spirit of the script. When Hamlet’s first multi-line speech began, and Onni finally had to watch it without any kind of work to distract him, he just let his face sink gently into his hands.  
  
“I mean, he’s putting real feeling into it.” Reynir sounded so unconvinced by what he was whispering in Onni’s ear. “You can’t deny that.”  
  
Onni peeked through his fingers, closing them again after another glimpse of the painfully heartfelt gesticulating. He was pretty sure there was no English word for the specific vicarious embarrassment he was feeling right now, and trying to explain the Finnish one seemed rather beyond the scope of this sound booth. He could only try to concentrate on making the lights happen on cue, and try not to weep when Lalli finally emerged, looking like he was making a pre-emptive effort on the motionless corpse act.  
  
“Reynir, have I mentioned you’re the only tolerable thing in this entire theatre?” Onni’s voice was strained as they watched Ophelia’s funeral scene in rapt mutual horror. Over the course of the past hour, they’d drawn closer to each other, now almost leaning into each other so they could whisper back and forth about the catastrophe unfolding in front of them.  
  
Reynir seemed a little taken aback, although it was hard to tell too well here in the dark. “You’re um, very tolerable too, Onni. I’ve really enjoyed these last few weeks.”  
  
Onni wasn’t sure how exactly these last few weeks could be seen as actually enjoyable. He thought about it as the play moved on, though, and he did have to admit he’d started really looking forward to seeing Reynir here three times a week. Even through all the stress of building these godawful props, and wondering how on earth one just _decided_ you were seeing some guy you were in a play with, and all that -  
  
“Oh, no.” Reynir’s voice was very softly horrified. “He’s going off script.” His hand crossed Onni’s to disable the cued end-of-scene lighting change as they waited for Emil’s careening remix of his death sequence to end, and the corpse of King Claudius returning from death in order to start sword-fighting again was some kind of final straw for Onni’s sense of normalcy.  
  
Onni took Reynir’s hand as it moved back over and pulled him close. The two people in the sound booth starting to make out couldn’t possibly make this play any worse. Onni reevaluated that position when he was pushed back against the control board and felt his butt hit a switch, plunging the theatre briefly into total darkness, then pulling it back into brightness as the movement of his body against Reynir’s flicked the switch back the other way.  
  
Onni could not keep up much awareness of exactly what kind of disco vibe their frantic kissing against the control board was giving the impromptu sword fight below them, not when Reynir was just as hysterically resigned to chaos as Onni and channeling it into groping him. By the time Reynir’s mouth came off his, Onni felt lightheaded, very much like he’d fucked this up beyond recognition, and freer than he ever had in his life. The latter feeling was tragically brief.  
  
“Shit, it’s on fire.” Onni spun around to see what Reynir had noticed. The props lay in tatters, one sword totally broken and Emil curled up in what may have been genuine distress at Sigrun’s feet. In the chaos, it looked like a wire had been sliced open, and the wooden backboard Onni and Reynir had spent most of a week painting had sparked. The two of them contemplated the flames together for three long seconds, unsure if they truly believed their eyes, before springing into action. As Onni ran towards the extinguisher, he wondered if this would get them out of doing a second night.  
  
********  
  
“A brilliant deconstruction of the form, the height of parody. Ten out of ten.” Tuuri pulled the newspaper up to her face, squinting as if the words might change if she read them at close enough a distance, before shoving it back down on the table. “They thought it was a joke! I hate this!”  
  
“At least they liked it.” Lalli shrugged and picked the mushrooms off his oven pizza before depositing them on Emil’s plate, stuffing the rest of the slice in his mouth.  
  
“It is a bit sad that we put in all that work and never got a second night.” Reynir had eaten his own oven pizza with probably more enthusiasm than it merited. It was nice that he always made such a point of appreciating the things Onni did for him.  
  
“I feel like I was only just hitting my stride.” Emil was still wearing the tiara, clearly reluctant to part with it. “I had a _vision_.”  
  
Onni cleared the plates. If he had learned anything from all this, it was that letting someone else clean your kitchen was a lot more bother than it was worth.


End file.
